2007: A Face Odyssey

By Daphne Merkin

Published: April 15, 2007

We have always been slightly uneasy - notwithstanding our growing cultural obsession with youth and physical perfection - about the enormous value we assign to female physiognomy, based as it is on nothing more substantive than an undemocratic rolling of the genetic dice. Clearly, although we have all been bequeathed a more or less similar arrangement of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth, neck, skin), there are some women who emerge, either by way of felicitous lineage or a hazard of good fortune, with mugs to die for. Audrey Hepburn. Vivien Leigh. Grace Kelly. Julie Christie. Julia Roberts. Halle Berry. Pen?pe Cruz. The variations may range from the gamine to the sultry, the classic to the exotic -- stopping along the way for the slightly more Nordic look that often goes with blond lovelies -- but the theme is the same. They are undeniably beautiful; we, by and large, however attractive or striking, are not. This tragic and unearned differential (one that is becoming ever more tragic in a ''looksist'' society) has led us to devise ways of minimizing beauty's importance with dispassionate abstractions or consoling, somewhat grandmotherly mantras. If you want to get high-minded about it, you can clutch for solace at the conjecture of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume that beauty ''exists merely in the mind . . . and each mind perceives a different beauty'' and hope that no one will notice that this observation, if it ever held up, preceded the invention of photography. Closer at hand is the adage ''Beauty is as beauty does,'' which is the kind of snippy comment Mary Poppins might have made if she came upon one of her charges preening before his or her reflection. Then there is the old platitude ''Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,'' which attempts a similar leveling of the playing field.

I suspect these reassurances never fooled any woman anxiously eyeing herself in the mirror before going out for the evening, and as we get older, this lifelong negotiation with the looking glass becomes only more fraught. (Many of us, I imagine, will eventually feel in sympathy with Bette Davis, who, as Queen Elizabeth I in ''The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,'' becomes apoplectic at the very thought of catching a glimpse of her ruined face, screaming, ''Break every mirror in the palace! I never want to see one in Whitehall again!'') The really noteworthy fact, however, is not that these ploys have never much worked but how singularly irrelevant they have become over the last decade -- almost like maxims from another planet. For one thing, the promise and gradual destigmatization of cosmetic surgery has led less-than-stunning women to believe that a gorgeous countenance is there for the paying. Another, more significant reason is that the contemporary archetype

of beauty, as seen on the runways and in fashion magazines, is no longer applicable or even familiar. For that matter, it's barely recognizable.

The faces I'm referring to seem to have arrived here

by spaceship from some silent lunar landscape, rather than by the bawling and bloody process by which ordinary mortals enter the world. The Platonic ideal of beauty is now as it never was: more humanoid than human, more the product of an art director's digitalized pastiche of desirable features than a naturally occurring phenomenon. The reasons for this include our increasingly sophisticated techniques for airbrushing flaws or imperfections out of the picture; our fascination with self-invention and technosexuality (also referred to as robot fetishism); our ever more phobic attitude toward aging and dying; and our worship of young, blank, unlived-in faces that resemble the baby-faced characters in Japanese animation films. Thanks to these influences, our aesthetic standards have mutated into an eerie image of female attractiveness that, if not unprecedented, has been relatively uncommon until now.

I think of this new typology as Android Beauty: part intergalactic and part neonatal; part Angelina Jolie and part Tilda Swinton; part ''2001: A Space Odyssey''

and part Bratz dolls (the post-Barbie fashion doll with exaggerated eyes and lips that looks, as Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker, ''as if the doll had undergone successive rounds of plastic surgery''), with a little bit of Bambi and those kitschy Keane portraits of lollipop-eyed waifs thrown into the mix. You can, of course, coin any term you like, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

The identifying signs of this change -- a radical reconception of what makes for feminine pulchritude -- can be readily enumerated. They include a high, rounded forehead; a giraffe neck; enormous eyes that are usually spaced low on the head and wide apart; an imperceptible nose; a pillowy or pouty mouth, but one with the lips always everted, as if ready to be kissed. Because the body on which this face is set is, needless to say, thin to thinner to twiglike, the head looks proportionally larger,

The New York plastic surgeon Yael Halaas, who notes that the laws of beauty have been ''amped up,'' attributes Kidman's cyboresque look to the ''Vulcan eyebrows'' that can result from too much or wrongly placed Botox. It might also have to do with the silicone-smooth surface of Kidman's skin, from which all traces of emotional expressiveness -- of having laughed or cried, struggled or aspired -- have been erased, leaving a

blank slate onto which we can read our own scripts. In this sense, Kidman functions both as herself and as

a ''sim'' -- a simulated version of herself, much like

the Daryl Hannah character in ''Blade Runner.'' Where once we tried to understand the fractured nature of identity by way of psychological concepts that pointed to an interior life, these days we seem to have traded in that somewhat demanding approach for an exteriorized, sci-fi dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable divisions within ourselves: goodbye doppelg?